yah that stuff i find annoying
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Soaring costs for Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre fail to deter officials
Build them and they will come. That’s the overwhelming philosophy on convention and exhibition centres — erect new ones or expand existing facilities and the visitors, and their cash, will roll in.
The City of Vancouver joined the intense competition with full vigour, deciding in 2004 that its facility was undersized and losing the city convention traffic.
The man in charge of the Crown corporation that runs the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre brims with confidence that the new facility, scheduled for completion next year, will be worth the vast sums of money that have since flowed.
And they are vast.
Costs have gone from the original estimate of $495 million in 2000 to the current $883 million.
“If you compare the expansion (costs), we’re in the cards,” said Warren Buckley, president and CEO of PavCo, the Crown corporation that runs the centre.
Boston has a new convention centre that cost $850 million “and it’s not as nice as the new one here.”
Phoenix’s new centre cost $775 million, Chicago just expanded for $800 million, Cleveland is proposing a $400 million expansion and Ottawa is considering a $400 million expansion.
Buckley conceded the convention centre market is saturated, but maintains Vancouver will be successful — the expansion tripling the current exhibition space on the waterfront at Canada Place.
Despite Buckley’s optimism, the province’s independent auditor general has reservations.
In a recent report, acting auditor general Errol Price said that although the latest approved budget was for $883.2 million, “there is no guarantee that this will be the final cost.”
The project was plagued by problems from its outset, the auditor general said.
The federal government came on board with a fixed contribution of $222.5 million and the province, initially matching Ottawa’s contribution, has been left to approve and fund the budget overruns.
A decision to turn the expanded facility into a showcase for the 2010 Winter Olympics and use it as the Games’ international media centre expanded the scope of the project, and put it on an accelerated completion schedule that forced up costs, the report says.
The total B.C. taxpayer burden is now more than $500 million, surpassing the infamous fast ferry fiasco under the previous NDP government.
When the auditor’s report came out, Finance Minister Carole Taylor brushed off the comparison to the PacifiCat ferries.
“At end of the day we’ll have a magnificent convention centre that we will all enjoy . . . and it will not be wrapped in plastic,” Taylor said, referring literally to the ferries’ protective cocoons.
http://dcnonl.com/article/id28761
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